cs.CVMay 20, 2026

CHOIR: Contact-aware 4D Hand-Object Interaction Reconstruction

Authors: Hao XuYilin LiuYinqiao WangChi-Wing FuNiloy J. Mitra

Organizations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China · University College London, United Kingdom · University College London, Adobe Research, United Kingdom

Abstract

We ask whether everyday open-world monocular videos can be turned into reusable 4D interaction primitives: articulated hand motion, object shape with 6D pose over time, and the when/where of contact. Such a capability would enable scalable mining of real interactions and, beyond reconstruction, support scene-aware synthesis and planning. However, reconstructing hand-object interaction (HOI) from challenging monocular videos remains difficult: methods often assume known objects or curated scenes, and separately estimated hands and objects easily become misaligned under clutter, occlusion, and unseen object geometries. Targeting this setting, we present CHOIR, a Contact-aware HOI Reconstruction framework for a monocular camera, using contact as an explicit coupling signal between hands and objects. CHOIR first initializes a coarse, contact-agnostic 4D HOI sequence from open-world visual priors. It then introduces a generative HOI spatial rectification module to predict ray-depth corrections and rectify hand-object relative placement, then derive initial per-frame contact correspondences on the rectified geometry. Last, a contact-aware joint optimization with dynamically updated contact constraints enforces geometric, temporal, and contact consistency. Experiments on controlled and challenging videos show that CHOIR improves object reconstruction, physical plausibility, and temporal consistency over state-of-the-art methods.

Explore similar work

May 14, 2026cs.CV

Real2Sim in HOI: Toward Physically Plausible HOI Reconstruction from Monocular Videos

Recovering 4D human-object interaction (HOI) from monocular video is a key step toward scalable 3D content creation, embodied AI, and simulation-based learning. Recent methods can reconstruct temporally coherent human and object trajectories, but these trajectories often remain visual artifacts while failing to preserve stable contact, functional manipulation, or physical plausibility when used as reference motions for humanoid-object simulation. This reveals a fundamental interaction gap: HOI reconstruction should not stop at tracking a human and an object, but should recover the relation that makes their motion a coherent interaction. We introduce HA-HOI\textbf{HA-HOI}, a framework for reconstructing physically plausible 4D HOI animation from in-the-wild monocular videos. Instead of treating the human and object as independent entities in an ambiguous monocular 3D space, we propose a human-first, object-follow\textit{human-first, object-follow} formulation. The human motion is recovered as the interaction anchor, and the object is reconstructed, aligned, and refined relative to the human action. The resulting kinematic trajectory is then projected into a physics-based humanoid-object simulation, where it acts as a teacher trajectory for stable physical rollout. Across benchmark and in-the-wild videos, HA-HOI\textbf{HA-HOI} improves human-object alignment, contact consistency, temporal stability, and simulation readiness over prior monocular HOI reconstruction methods. By moving beyond visually plausible trajectory recovery toward physically grounded interaction animation, our work takes a step toward turning general monocular HOI videos into scalable demonstrations for humanoid-object behavior. Project page: https://knoxzhao.github.io/real2sim_in_HOI/
Yubo Zhao, Yujin Chai, Yunao Dong +4
Jun 3, 2026cs.CV

Recovering Physically Plausible Human-Object Interactions from Monocular Videos

In this paper, we propose RePHO, a method to reconstruct physically plausible human-object interactions (HOI) from monocular videos. While existing kinematic-based approaches produce visually plausible motion, they often result in physically implausible artifacts such as interpenetration and object floating. To overcome these issues, we introduce a physics-guided reconstruction framework. We begin with a kinematic estimate and then refine it by training a policy with reinforcement learning (RL). This policy is optimized to reproduce the interaction in a physics simulator. Because kinematic estimates are typically noisy, naive RL training can fail. Therefore, we propose an adaptive sampling strategy with a dual self-updating mechanism that can identify the frames with the most informative and reliable kinematic reconstruction. Our process progressively improves reconstruction quality and yields physically consistent HOI sequences. We demonstrate our approach on two standard HOI benchmarks and achieve clear improvements in physical plausibility metrics over state-of-the-art methods. Project Page: https://dingbang777.github.io/RePHO/
Dingbang Huang, Etienne Vouga, Qixing Huang +1
Aug 28, 2026cs.CV

GraspHOI: Full-Body 3D Human-Object Reconstruction with Finger-Level Grasps from a Single In-the-Wild Image

Existing monocular full-body 3D human-object interaction (HOI) methods do not combine explicit finger-level grasp optimization with category-agnostic object reconstruction. Despite plausible body-object configurations, their fingers may float from or penetrate objects instead of forming a grasp. We present GraspHOI, the first framework that reconstructs a full-body 3D HOI from a single image while explicitly optimizing finger articulation against the reconstructed object. GraspHOI recovers object geometry directly, without predefined meshes or a fixed category vocabulary. It reconstructs the body, hands, and object separately, aligning them in metric camera space via depth-based registration and image-space alignment. Occlusion-aware palmar correspondences seat the object against the grasping hand, and contact-aware optimization refines arm and finger articulation to form surface contact without excessive penetration. Across four benchmarks and six baselines, GraspHOI improves relative human-object placement, hand accuracy, and contact plausibility. Full pipeline code will be released.
Semin Kim, Haechan Shin, Jongyoo Kim